


—headfirst into emerald pools

by snowborn



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Fluff, Gen, M/M, Mutual Pining, and they're in love duh, just two boys going on a waterfall hike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:27:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29340549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowborn/pseuds/snowborn
Summary: And because Hajime understands his place in the universe as Oikawa Tooru's number one sucker, he is left staring at his best friend's back for the next three and a half hours.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 8
Kudos: 47





	—headfirst into emerald pools

**Author's Note:**

> i was literally kermittyping.gif trying to write last night bc today is my birthday and i wanted to post something cute and happy so! here is my offering after 4 straight hours lol.
> 
> HERE YALL GO, IWAOISTS COME GET UR FOOD

\--

Their trek into the forest begins at daybreak, just as the sun crests over the horizon. Tooru volunteers to take the lead, as it was his idea to go on this hike anyway, and he’s got sunscreen smeared over his nose and cheeks with one of those stupid, gnarled walking sticks in hand like a true wilderness explorer, and who is Hajime to refuse him, really. 

And because Hajime knows and understands his place in the universe as Oikawa Tooru’s number one sucker, he is left staring at his best friend’s back for the next three and a half hours. 

At some point, in between easy recollections of past summers spent together with grasping hands and popsicle-sticky mouths and the lingering scent of Salonpas, Tooru had yanked his sweater off and knotted it around his waist at the first prickle of heat on his neck, leaving him in a loose, thin shirt that sucked all the moisture out of Hajime’s mouth. It only gets worse for him after that; as the sun rises higher and higher in the sky, Hajime’s eyes are glued to the droplets of sweat that slide down the back of Tooru’s neck, staining the collar of his flimsy shirt and creeping across his back like ivy, until Tooru is pink and drenched with sweat. 

“You okay back there, Iwa-chan?” comes Tooru’s lilting voice, a slight hitch the only indication that he might be the least bit winded. He rolls his head back casually and glances over his shoulder, pinning Hajime with a playful look as if he knows exactly what he’s thinking. “We can take a break, if you need one.”

Hajime tears his eyes away and aims for the slivers of blue sky he can catch through the gaps in the leaves above them. He grips the straps of his backpack tighter, ignoring the uncomfortable slide of sweat-slick palms against webbing. “I’m fine,” he grunts. Somewhere, a bird chirps quietly. “What were you talking about?”

Tooru rolls his eyes, but Hajime catches the quirk of his lips as he faces front. His smile always gives him away. “As I was  _ saying _ , before you so rudely ignored me…”

\--

The hike does not get easier because it is five miles of constant uphill, which Tooru had neglected to mention, but after a while Hajime’s mind shuts off, arresting any thoughts he had previously had of the world outside of the forest and returning him to his base instincts. Right now it is only Hajime and the grind of his shoes against the grit of the sand and the thick summer air pressing against his sweaty skin and the earthy scent of soil after rain and the heft of his backpack behind him; and before him only Tooru, with his long limbs and rapturous smile, his strong back and his commanding presence, and it is here that Hajime recalls a feeling he’d thought was lost to the ages -- the devotion of an angel to his god, the loyalty of a right-hand man to his general, the unwavering trust between an ace and his setter. It is here that Hajime reminds himself that he is worthy enough to follow. 

The path snakes deeper into the wood, twisting and turning from packed dirt to sand to silt, where they find the river. It’s stagnant here, where clouds of tiny, biting bugs have made their home, with leaves and sticks and clumps of dirt settled at the bottom. Tooru follows the path to the shallows, sends a glance over his shoulder as if to say  _ Watch me, Iwa-chan, _ as if Hajime doesn’t always have his eyes on him, and Tooru sticks his arms out like an airplane as he hops across, his shoes making a satisfying smack as he hits each thick flat stone lining the bottom of the river. Then, as he fits the water bottle to his lips, he turns to watch Hajime.

Hajime has always prided himself on being resilient and rock-solid under pressure, but the vision of Tooru standing there, the long line of his throat working to swallow around the water in his mouth, coupled with the intensity in Tooru’s eyes is something incredibly distracting -- it’s the look Tooru gets right before a serve, the way his eyes go hard and sharp like flint before tinder, before he tosses the ball up with a mere flick of his wrist and sends it over the net like a cannonball with a vicious crack of his arm -- so much so that Hajime nearly slips on a rickety stone and one of his feet dips and kicks up a splatter of stagnant water, a bright brown shimmer in the sun.

“Careful, Iwa-chan! Here!” Tooru yells, dropping his water bottle to hold out the butt of his walking stick for Hajime to grab. 

Heat rising to his cheeks, Hajime bats it away, grumbling, “I’m not drowning, idiot.” It’s not until he reaches the other side of the river that he and Tooru realize, with both feet on solid ground, that Hajime has to finish this hike with one soggy sock and shoe. 

“It’s okay, Iwa-chan,” Tooru sings merrily to the tune of Hajime’s step and  _ slosh _ behind him. “We’re not far from the waterfall now!”

The canopy of leaves above them begins to peter out as the trail flattens just barely. The signpost by the barbed wire fence says one more mile to the waterfall. 

This stretch of land is all grit and sand-swallowed stone on a loosely marked path. Surrounded on all sides by dry brush and bare trees, it looks worlds different from the shade and safety of the forest. The midday sun beats down on them so mercilessly that Hajime can feel the pinpricks of heat at his scalp, and he shucks his shirt off like it burns. He can feel the sweat evaporating as soon as his skin is exposed to the air, but a familiar heat begins to warm him from the inside-out when Tooru whips around to point out some bird in some tree --  _ Look, Hajime, a little bustard!  _ \-- and subsequently loses his ability to speak, eyes locked on Hajime’s body. 

Hajime feels smug, and his face reflects this; he has worked tirelessly in the gym to sculpt the very pectorals and abdominals and biceps Tooru is quite obviously ogling, but the smugness is short-lived because although Tooru is speechless, he does not stop walking backward, and Hajime’s frantic, “Tooru, look out!” is not enough to drag him back down to reality fast enough, so he runs straight into a tree. 

A bright peal of laughter bursts from Hajime’s lips unbidden, a guffaw tinged with exhaustion that scares a family of tiny black birds from their perch in a nearby tree. Tooru is pouting, rubbing the back of his head, and Hajime is still heaving when he squats down in front of him to help.

“Just leave me here to die, Iwa-chan,” Tooru says dramatically, eyes focused somewhere left of Hajime’s soggy shoe, cheeks pink with fatigue or embarrassment or both. The strands of chestnut hair curling around his ears make him look cherubic in the radiant summer sun. A smile spreads along Hajime’s face, prompting Tooru to glare at him, an angry cherub with a halo of fire. “What are you smiling about? I just ran into a tree because of you! I might have a concussion, you know…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hajime chuckles, leaning close to cradle Tooru’s face in his big hands. Tooru sinks into them, the plush of his pout becoming more pronounced, catching Hajime’s gaze. He wants to look at him forever. “Now could you tell me what day it is?”

\--

Tooru breezes through Hajime’s concussion protocol because he is, in fact, not concussed, just mortified at having been caught staring so openly, as if the universe had really set out to show Hajime how thirsty he is -- for him, specifically. Because of this, Tooru strips off his own shirt in retaliation, exposing a beautiful, mole-dotted canvas with which Hajime is well-acquainted, and marches away with vigor. He does not look back again. 

Tooru, when flustered, is liable to go running headfirst into something if only to alleviate whatever temporary embarrassment he’s gotten himself into, so Hajime stays right on his heels. Hajime knows this because he has known Tooru for twenty-one years, has loved him for all of them, and to him and maybe the universe, that counts for something.

Tooru holds himself a little straighter with barely restrained excitement as the desert brush bleeds into another wooded area, one littered with split logs and hulking boulders. Hajime follows Tooru as he climbs over the remnants of a lightning-charred tree and presses himself close to the boulders, digging his calloused fingers into the crag as he hoists himself up and over.

The sound of rushing water hits his ears suddenly, and he hears Tooru’s ecstatic whooping up ahead --  _ We’re so close, Iwa-chan! _ \-- and he feels revitalized by Tooru’s infectious joy and the taste of cooling air as he ducks beneath a low-hanging branch to slide off the other side of the boulder and, feeling his feet hit packed earth, watches as the path opens up to a watering hole dotted with flat boulders and, when he looks up, a glittering, one-hundred foot waterfall.

Apart from the couple on the other side of the boulder and an older man bobbing in the far reaches of the water, they may as well be in their own little world. Hajime’s feet take him until he’s shoulder to shoulder with Tooru. When Tooru looks his way, Hajime feels rooted in place. “We finally made it,” Tooru says, breathless with giddy laughter. Hajime wants to kiss him so badly. 

Instead, Hajime drops his bag on the nearest boulder and begins toeing off his shoes. “Do you want to eat a little before we swim? We did a lot of walking today,” he says, laying out his socks to dry. A bright blue dragonfly whizzes past, and when Hajime looks up he sees that there are dragonflies everywhere, gossamer wings reflecting the light.

“ _ Yes _ , I’m starving, I thought you’d never ask!” Tooru responds, dropping down beside him. He fishes around in his bag noisily, letting out a little  _ aha!  _ when he pulls out the egg salad sandwich he’d made that morning and a fresh bottle of water. He kicks his shoes off as he takes a big bite, humming to himself as he looks out across the water. 

Hajime pauses from digging in his own bag to take in the slope of Tooru’s nose, the freckles that have begun to dot his apple-red cheeks, the way the mountain breeze toys with the sweat-curled ends of his hair like a lover. The boy whose voice is the soundtrack of Hajime’s life looks impossibly serene here, summer-warm and dappled with golden sunlight, in piercing contrast to the man who will undoubtedly conquer the world. Hajime knows that the boy is a gun, but the boy always finds a way to remind him that he is also a soft, beating heart, cupped by Hajime’s careful hands, and there is nowhere safer for him but here. 

\--

Tooru tries to sneak away to go cliff jumping three different times, but Hajime catches him every time.

“When you wake up tomorrow without a sunburn,” Hajime says lightly, smearing sunscreen all over Tooru’s frowning face and down the back of his blushing neck, “you’ll be kneeling at my feet in thanks.” 

Tooru grins, wicked. Hajime would think it kind of sexy, if not for the fact that Tooru’s face is covered in a white cast of zinc, so he resembles something like a ghost clown. As it stands, Hajime finds it more endearing than anything. “Iwa-chan, if you wanted me on my knees for you, you could’ve just --”

Hajime slaps his sunscreen-slick palm over Tooru’s mouth and Tooru, reflexively, sticks his tongue out. As he sputters and spits, Hajime continues to slather sunscreen along Tooru’s arms, unbothered. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Tooru.” 

Tooru blows a raspberry at him, as one does when they are on a losing streak with the universe, and snatches the sunscreen bottle away to finish up the rest of his body as Hajime touches up his own layer of sunscreen, and then they’re climbing up the cliffside together. There’s a sign nailed into the side of the cliff that might be warning hikers away from jumping, but it’s been defaced so thoroughly that Hajime can’t really tell. Either way, nothing will deter them from jumping off this thirty- or possibly forty-foot cliff, not even the feeling of sand sticking to their palms or the slide of their bare feet against the jagged, vertical rock face. 

There are two places to jump from the cliff -- the lower ledge, which takes some shimmying and twisting to get to, and the higher ledge, which is narrow and juts out above the endless expanse of water. Both are equally terrifying when you’re looking down, and Hajime feels the moisture slicking his grainy palms as he peeks over the edge, his heart pounding in his ears. He’s about to open his mouth to tell Tooru that he can’t do it, that he might have to chicken out of this one, but Tooru fixes him with the most breathtaking smile he’s ever seen, and Hajime falls in love all over again. 

“Last one down has to buy dinner!” Tooru shouts, always the braver one between them, and then he’s leaping off the ledge, an angel without wings. His scream echoes off the bordering cliff faces, drowned out by the thunderous waterfall just a few feet away, until he hits the water with a resounding splash. There’s faint clapping from the bottom, where more hikers have begun to arrive.

Tooru sputters loudly as he comes up for air. He looks so tiny and happy, with his hair plastered to his face and water in his nose.

“Come on in, Iwa-chan!” Tooru cries as he paddles away from the cliff, making space for Hajime, easy as breathing. “The water’s fine!” 

From his spot on the bluff, Hajime can see the stark outline of Tooru’s pale body against the greenish-blue water, skinny limbs starfished out as his airy laughter wafts up into the air like steam. The waves curve around him, tender and soft, and Hajime wants nothing more than to be down there, floating with the boy whose heart he holds in his hands -- who holds his heart in his hands.

He doesn’t think twice before he falls. 

(What's there to be afraid of? He hadn’t thought anything of the first time he fell, and he’d ended up pledging his love to the boy who lived down the street. 

This? This was just accepting the love the universe had given him all those years ago, wholeheartedly, with his eyes wide open.)

When Hajime jumps he feels like flying, and the water rushes up to greet him like an old friend --

Through the haze of bubbles a hand curls around his ever so gently, and when Hajime’s eyes flutter open in the crystal-clear water, all he can see is Tooru smiling back at him, effervescent.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i hope u enjoyed these two dummies being happy and gross <3 
> 
> happy birthday to me <3
> 
> let me know if u liked it! and as always, come find me on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/babyseijoh)
> 
> see u soon <3


End file.
